


Salutations Distinguées

by Kitty (Katatafish)



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Dubious Consent, Dubious French, Financial Issues, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, M/M, Mild Angst, Mild Sexual Content, Prostitution
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-24
Updated: 2018-06-24
Packaged: 2019-05-28 01:47:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15038012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Katatafish/pseuds/Kitty
Summary: Antonio and Lovino discuss St Raphaela's burgeoning financial issues.Inspired by 'Partners in Crime' by Ludwiggle73





	Salutations Distinguées

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ludwiggle73](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ludwiggle73/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Partners in Crime](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13547091) by [Ludwiggle73](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ludwiggle73/pseuds/Ludwiggle73). 



_St Raphaela’s_

_Rue du Jubilé_

_Belfaux_

_Madame Arlovskaya,_

_Please find enclosed the sum total of one hundred and fifty pounds, to serve as a partial payment towards the debt outstanding as of January 1923. Unfortunately, it is with my deepest regret and most sincere of apologies that I am unable to provide the remaining total of money at this time._

_The building has recently suffered greatly as a result of the storms that have plagued the island during the past few weeks, and we have been forced to dedicate a significant percentage of this month’s profits to fixing and maintaining the roofing and the drainage system._

_It may also have come to your attention that our profits as of late have paled in comparison to those collected last year. This is due to a staffing issue that has arisen as a result of a non-contagious illness suffered by one of our most successful girls, the onset of which forced her to retire. As of now, we have been unable to hire someone new to fill the room she once occupied._

_I understand that our inability to pay the debt has inconvenienced you considerably, and accept that this may result in an extra fine to act as compensation for the delay. I am working to do whatever I can to pay the debt and subsequent interest in a timely matter, but I must humbly request that an extension be added to the repayment period._

_Je vous prie d’agréer, Madame Arlovskaya, l’expression de mes salutations distinguées._

_-Antonio Vargas_

* * *

 

 

Lovino hasn’t felt the warmth of the sun’s glow on his bare skin in near enough five years. The likes of which seemingly doesn’t dare to grace the Godforsaken island of Belfaux with its presence. No, that’s an honour reserved solely for Amalfi sands and Calabrian skies; for barefooted children stealing summer berries from bustling market stalls and only being caught when the sea’s salt fails to rinse the tart purple stains from their fingertips; for curled caramel hair that catches the breeze just so.

He remembers the last time his nose bronzed and his shoulders reddened in the heat, as much as he wishes that he couldn’t. On days like this one- where the light teases him in beams between heavy flocked brocade curtains, only to be chased away by the rain before lunchtime like a rabbit by a ferret-the memory clouds his already foggy brain, as though he’s stupid enough to hope that an hour of blue sky rather than grey may be anything close to a possibility, never mind a likelihood.

It’s still spring, but only just. He’s started seeing peaches on the market stalls again. Later that afternoon, he’ll earn enough to buy two of them on his way home, from a trader preparing to pack up for the evening. They’re not yet soft and sweet or filled with juice, as the early fruits often aren’t, but the brothers still lounge together on their crumbling balcony to devour them as if they were picked at the height of summer. The buildings of the Piazza del Campo shine a vibrant calendula orange under the setting sun, and the sky itself is bathed in the same dusky pink that paints their freckled cheeks. The sounds of birds hang in the air, and faint music plays from a considerable distance away, but the young brothers themselves sit in a contented silence, pressed tightly up against each other on the splintered and fading wooden bench, under a threadbare throw that serves no real purpose. Lovino allows it, for now.

The bastard thing doesn’t have the courtesy or common decency to bid them a bittersweet goodbye when they leave from the port of Livorno some weeks later.

Lovino doesn’t think Feliciano remembers, and if he does, then he’s never given Lovino any reason to think that is the case. Though it’s not as if he truly needs to remember- the child makes his own light and has his own warmth, however damned and damning it may be.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Now, when he feels the beginnings of a soft golden touch of the sun on his collarbone, and spilling over to the back of his shoulder, he doesn’t let himself hope- he pulls his oversized shirt back up to cover his skin from where it has fallen down to his elbow, draws the drapes tightly shut so that no light can enter the room, and switches on a nearby lamp before collapsing in his favoured window seat perch to scan the letter again.

If the chimes of the grandfather clock in the hallway outside the attic suite are correct- which they are not, far more often than they are- then it’s nearing seven o’clock in the morning, and the well renowned sounds of angels hard at work (and of the patrons trying to keep up with their fraudulent enthusiasm) is dying down much later than usual. From his seat two floors above, he can still hear some lucky sod going for another round. Part of him can’t help but to feel somewhat impressed.

They’ll be gone soon enough, back to wives far smarter than themselves who feign ignorance, and back to children that look up at them as if they hold the world in the pocket of their trousers, back to normal jobs and orthodox lives. And when the angels have used up most of the English shore’s clean water, sewn wads of paper pound notes in to their pillowcases with long, loose stitches, and eaten their way through half of the week’s grocery delivery, they’ll return to their beds to while away the hours in slumber.

Lovino won’t sleep today- he hasn’t done so for far longer than he’d care to admit, or to even think about. He catches a sacred ten minutes after a particularly exhausting client- maybe he’s only exhausting because the Italian is already half-asleep, though involuntarily so- but the rapidly drying, thick substance clinging to the backs of his thighs and spread between his legs from fervent tossing and turning forces him up and off the thin mattress, towards the direction of the nearest washroom. There is an ever growing pile of paper on the desk that demands an amount of attention he can’t bear to give it, and his younger brother has once again seen fit to spend the darker hours somewhere too far away from the church for Lovino’s liking.

 

There’s a light tap on the door, so light that Lovino barely registers it before the door slowly creaks open.

“Are you still awake?” Antonio asks tentatively, as though he’s speaking to a wild animal that he’d rather not anger. Lovino hums indignantly in reply, not gracing the man with even the simplest of glances in his direction. He can hear the sound of sloshing liquid against glass as the Spaniard pads across the room.

“Can you open this for me?” he holds the bottle up to Lovino’s face with a hoarse, tired voice and sheepish eyes.

“Is this all you went downstairs for?” the Italian spits back at him.

 

He takes the bottle anyway, and strolls over to the desk in the corner of the room where a collection of only slightly used glasses has begun to build. Setting the sheet of parchment down, he picks up one of them and scans it for dirt, before filling it to just below the rim with cheap, clear liquid that stings his nostrils and makes his eyes water. Antonio can’t seem to snatch it up fast enough, so Lovino takes the opportunity, while the elder is distracted, to slide the rest of the bottle in to a random drawer, concealed under piles of forgotten documents and applications, and purposefully ignored letters.

 

“No- I brought you these up, too,”

A full packet of cigarettes is tossed on the desk that stands between the pair, quickly followed by the slam of the empty glass against the wood.

_‘How generous’_ , Lovino thinks. He doesn’t need to say it out loud- Antonio has long since learned to read the Italian’s various sighs and eye-rolls no matter how subtle he thinks he’s being.

“I finished that letter for you,” he shrugs, shaking a cigarette from the carton, holding it between his teeth but not making any move to light it.

“You might want to check it over though, my French is still shit,”

“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Antonio shrugs, but he picks up the delicately folded and inked sheet of paper anyway, with a significantly less elegant touch, scanning over it as if his own French is any better- anything more advanced than the phrase, _“Commerce? C'est un pound pour l'heure.”_

 

As satisfied with the letter as he can be, Lovino falls back on to the creaking bed frame and solid mattress with a dramatic huff, the unlit cigarette still clenched between his teeth. He rolls over on to his side, brings his knees up to rest under his chin, throws a lithe arm over the edge and attempts to suppress a yawn under Antonio’s watchful gaze. If Lovino thought him worthy of the effort it would take to twist his neck in the direction of where the Spaniard still stands, he would see that the gaze, while slightly amused, is laced with a considerable amount of care and concern. As it often tends to be.

 

“You should probably try to sleep for a bit, Cariño. You look exhausted… and you have an outcall, later today. This evening,”

And it would seem that this particular piece of information is important enough to warrant Lovino’s full attention, because no sooner does Antonio get the chance to say the word ‘outcall’, than the Italian has sat up, his back ram-rod straight, glaring at him with such an irate look that only Lovino could truly master it.

 

“Excuse me? Since _when?”_ he stutters, eyebrows drawing close together and fingers gripping the crumpled duvet as his voice raises.

“ _Please_ don’t shout Lovi, you’ll wake everyone else up,”

Antonio continues before Lovino gets the chance to raise his voice even further in indignant protest.

“I know you don’t like doing them- least of all with him- but Mr Southcliffe is absolutely head over heels for you. We need the money, you know we do. We’ll get more from this than from you working the salon all night,”

“And is that all I am to you? An easy money-maker?”

“Don’t be like this, not now,”

 

On a usual day, by this point, it’s likely that Antonio would have given up on the argument completely, and retired to another room to wallow, leaving the Italian to bring himself down from a frustrated high on the cold walk over to Rook Street. Lovino doesn’t know what’s gotten in to the Spaniard this morning, but it’s entirely unsettling to hear his voice, sounding just as tired as his own eyelids feel, toeing the line between pleading and begging.

“Listen- I negotiated it down to a few hours, from an overnight. I’m sorry, I wish you didn’t have to do this, but we really don’t have a choice anymore,”

Lovino eyes his stooping back and shaking hands, the deep lines of his ever so slightly yellow-tinted, sallow face, and the way his hair curls differently when he’s left it one day too long between washes. He wishes he could find it within him to fire back with an antagonistic quip. He wishes they weren’t both quite so pathetic.

 

_“At least if it were an overnight, I’d get a hot meal and a decent night of sleep out of it,”_ there’s less bite to his words now, and Antonio’s face relaxes just a little, but the atmosphere between them is still thick with worried tension.

“Well, I’m sure you can negotiate something. Just, _be civil_ \- alright?” he’s never sounded so defeated.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Lovino shrugs halfheartedly in reply.

 

There’s a pregnant pause, and silence settles over the room like a thick blanket. The moaning, and the creaking, and the banging- they’ve stopped, for now.

 

“That’s all I ask,”

 

Neither of them know what to do now.

 

Lovino is still chewing on the end of the cigarette. Antonio fishes an old, beaten wonderlite out of his pocket, and holds it up to the tobacco. His stare lingers on Lovino’s shoulder- his shirt has started to slip down again- and he longs for even the lightest touch of that smooth skin. But Antonio is an intelligent man, who prefers that his hand remains attached to the rest of his arm, and so he refrains. He walks back across the room, to the spot by the desk where he had originally stood.

“I need to speak with Gilbert, I should be back before eight- I’ll post this letter while I’m out. Is there an envelope here?”

There is, and he knows there is. It sits in plain sight, already addressed with Lovino’s most careful penmanship (which is not saying much- but it’s a damn sight better than Antonio’s). He’s just speaking for the sake of speaking, to keep the ever-feared awkward silence at bay, and Lovino knows this. Then he facilitates it, by gesturing towards where it lies, among other, less pristine things.

Letter in hand, tucked neatly in to its envelope, Antonio is once again about to disappear around the bedroom door when he stops halfway over the threshold, catching his fingers on the brass doorknob as though he has forgotten something.

It’s not a subject he particularly wants to broach, but it needs to be done sooner or later- preferably sooner, while it’s likely that Antonio will be otherwise occupied during the fallout.

 

“When you next see Feli, can you remind him of the fact that he has a job, and that I can’t afford for him to be slacking off every night. I don’t know what’s gotten in to him, but he needs to realise that he has regulars that we’re all relying on to eat, and to keep the roof over our heads. It’d be nice if he bothered to show up in the parlour every once in a while,”

 

And with that, he’s gone, leaving Lovino alone with two-thirds of a burning cigarette and the overwhelming sensation of a feeling that he can’t recognise- perhaps it just doesn’t have a name.

The cigarette soon burns down to his fingers, and he crushes it in to the bedside table without truly being aware of his own actions. There’s a joyful chatter under his window, and his body drags itself up from the bed to investigate before his mind registers exactly what the noise is. He pulls the curtain back just an inch. The sky has settled to its usual clouded grey, but the light of his brother’s laughter illuminates the path leading to the back door of the bordel that he and Elizabeta walk on, with a gang of stray cats at their feet, and their ankles wet with the morning dew. Feliciano’s ears must have been burning.

 

Lovino returns to the bed.

 

* * *

 

 

Sometimes, when he’s being fucked in to bed sheets of a higher thread-count than his own, Lovino thinks of Antonio. The thoughts don’t replace the fat paunch hanging over his back, or the calloused yet dexterous fingers digging in to his slight hips, or the hot breaths on the back of his neck- they’re not quite the sort. They struggle to distract from the stinging friction between the delicate skin of his wrists and a faux velveteen rope, or the awkward angle he is forced to hold his neck at, or the dissatisfied, almost repulsed roll of his stomach.

They’re there, nonetheless.

In the grand scheme of life, death, and sex, Southcliffe is not a bad man. He’s not a good man, by any stretch of the imagination- Lovino knows now that they don’t exist, not truly. But he’s not _bad_. His fifth-floor apartment overlooks the ceasefire zone of the border between the French and English shores, yellow sandstone among brilliant white brick, but with just as rich an interior. He whispers to Lovino with gentle French words, his jaw just a slight too loose for them to be native. He fills him with sweet mignardises from the mainland, and wine sweeter than St Raphaela’s house bottle.

But oh, good Lord does he fuck like an Englishman. Shockingly fast and carnally rough, and more often than not, several rounds over a short session. Still with powdered sugar dusted on his fingertips and collected in the corners of his lips, Lovino is thrown to his knees, or on his back, to the heavily cushioned bed. The cushions are tossed to the ground in a similarly enthusiastic fashion just seconds later, before Southcliffe himself collapses on the mattress, one hand crawling up the inside of Lovino’s thigh, the other steadying himself intrusively close to the side of the Italian’s head. There’s no preparation- that’s Lovino’s responsibility. At least now, after several years, he knows what to expect.

Southcliffe likes him loud. Most of them do, he’s discovered. Moaning and writhing, and crying out every now and again for good measure, to let the downstairs neighbours know exactly what they’re missing. If he’s in a rush, Lovino will throw in a nickname coated in a honey-sweet exhale, and find himself clothed and two pounds richer in mere minutes. He doesn’t know his patron’s real name- Southcliffe might not even be his real surname- but Southcliffe doesn’t know his either, so it’s not a matter of great importance.

And he watches the clouds pass outside the window, or traces the lines of the filigree on the wallpaper, and thinks of a voice far more close to home than the Belfaux drawl, imagining soft sand rather than the isle’s stone under his feet.

Never one to stay for a cigarette, Lovino is out of the door with little fanfare almost as soon as Southcliffe pulls out and rolls on to his back, today completely spent after much less time than usual. But for once, the Italian can't say he's particularly glad for it.

**Author's Note:**

> For the wonderful Ludwiggle73- who I've never spoken to properly, but I know that they are amazing, and talented, and deserve the world. Unfortunately, the world is not mine to give. However, this mini-fic is!
> 
> I didn't get much in to the juicier aspects of their story line, because I didn't wish to impose on any of the author's original plans for the pair and whichever aspects of the storyline they may wish to cover further, but I was so intrigued by Antonio, Lovino and Feliciano throughout 'Partners in Crime' that I couldn't help but write a little something. This was also significantly inspired by the movie L'Apollonide. (Also, Rue du Jubile is named after the Nick Cave song 'Jubilee Street'- which, along with his song 'We Know Who You Are', fits Belfaux perfectly)
> 
> I'd like to take this opportunity to apologise for any bad french in this fic- the last time I took a French lesson I was 13, and my teachers were encouraging me NOT to take it as one of my GCSE options because they didn't think I would pass. And it's been a while since then, so make of that what you will.
> 
> Also, a massive thanks to Ludwiggle73 for being a continuously brilliant writer, and one of the highlights of my weeks for the past few months. I appreciate your works so much <3


End file.
